Archive for August, 2012

#7 Cutting the Grass, Without Using any Gas

After a year of use, I am quite pleased with this rotary lawn mower. This mower seems to take about the same amount of effort as a gas mower; but without the smell, the noise, the vibration, the gas or the heavy weight. It’s also really nice to not have to worry about holding onto the thing to keep the engine from turning off.

The only catch is that you need to keep the grass more under control than with a gas mower. These mowers cannot cut long weeds and blades of grass very well. For those situations, I use an electric weed eater. This combination covers just about every situation I’ve run into.

Rotary mowers are great if you are cutting grass on a small to medium sized lot. They take up less space. There’s no dealing with and storing gas. All around, it’s a great solution that fits many people’s needs.

Message to the Voting Cattle – Larken Rose

This pretty much distills down to 20 minutes what is fucked up about statism and the world of today. Larken Rose is a brilliant speaker who gets his message across quite succinctly.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an Austrian economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher who is known for his private law society, which advocates a radical transformation of the legal system where all parties are subject to the same rules and nobody is exempt from the same kinds of rules that govern everyone else.

He is a Professor Emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Hoppe is the author of several widely discussed books and his work has been translated to 22 languages. He is currently living with his wife in Istanbul, Turkey.

Analysis of Democracy

In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe compares monarchies with democratic states. Hoppe claims that the structural perverse incentives inherent in democracy make it more prone to destroy wealth than comparable monarchical regimes. A monarch, being a long term ruler and able to further bequeath his position, has interest in the long term well being of the economy, would often be hesitant to excessively accumulate debt, or otherwise engage in large-scale short-term capital consumption compared to a similar democratically elected ruler, who is more akin to a renter, or temporary custodian of the state due to the shorter time he has to use his power for his benefit. Hoppe further notes that the theoretical possibility of entrance into government also doles the citizenship resistance to excessive abuse of government power, as compared to monarchies, in which abusive monarchs where often overthrown and killed. Read the rest of this entry »